Book Review: Freeset by Sarina Dahlan

The sequel to Reset continues the story of the post-apocalyptic world of the Four Cities

Sarina Dahlan’s Reset and its prequel Preset depict the post-apocalyptic world of the Four Cities, seemingly the only surviving remnant of humanity. Through the eyes of the original founder Eli, the hidden “Crone” Eleanor, and artists/lovers Aris and Metis, humans grew and tried to transcend the “reset” of Tabula Rasa that every four years wipes out the memories of nearly everyone.

Freeset continues and completes the story of Eli, Eleanor, Metis, Aris, and the Four Cities.

The first book, Reset, was at its heart a love story. Not just between Aris and Metis, the main characters caught in the inevitability of the quadrennial cycle of the memory-erasing Tabula Rasa, but also between Eli, the planner and creator of the four cities, and Eleanor, his secret (as far as most people are concerned) co-creator. Eleanor is in a sense the serpent in the dystopian garden, providing and offering methods for people to, if not break free of the cycle, at least have memories of their previous 4-year lives. It’s a story about the testament and power of love.

Preset takes love in a different direction as we see, two centuries earlier, the love of trying to save humanity, itself the driving force in a novel that shows the early life of Eli and Eleanor. We get to see how the Four Cities came to be after the disastrous fall of the old order. It’s a much less hopeful book than the first, a darker tone spread across two timeframes: the fall itself, and the foundation of the cities.

Freeset, this new novel, picks up the story as a true sequel to Reset. Freeset decides to do something different: to its strength, and to its weakness, this third and final novel in the sequence decides to deeply explore its society in a way we didn’t see in Preset (since that is a story of the founding of the cities) or Reset (because of its strong focus on the relationships driving the city more than on the technology). And to an extent, Freeset does try to capture that dynamic by showing the strength and endurance of the bonds between the four characters.

Where Freeset differs is in explaining and showing a fair amount of the underpinnings of the dystopia that we saw built in Preset and saw in full in Reset. I think there is a potential weakness in showing and explaining too much of a dystopia, and I think that this novel shows the perils of doing so. This goes to the whole idea of worldbuilding, the shared delusion, and what is shown and not shown in a story. One cannot completely capture the complexity of a world, for we cannot even understand the complexity of the one we have here, much less one in a novel. And in many ways, depicting a dystopia requires a careful hand to let the reader fill in blanks and details, and so avoid raising obvious questions.

In Freeset, I think, Dahlan doesn’t quite strike that balance. In Reset, we focus on the relationships and in a very general way discuss the mechanics of Tabula Rasa and the superstructure of the repressive state that Eli the Planner has made. Those are all background to the story of Aris and Metis, and between Eli and his longtime partner Eleanor. Here, though, the nitty-gritty of the state is laid bare in two tentpoles that drive the narrative.

First is the police force, and the tactics and people that compose it. This focuses primarily on Scylla (a menacing name, noting that Dahlan is good at names), who is hunting Dreamers (the rebels of the first book) and Eleanor, Eli’s former wife. Scylla starts as a Javert-like character, determined to do his best in his duty. He is in a real sense a viewpoint character for the reader who might be skeptical of the rebellion and those trying to escape Tabula Rasa, but slowly starts to see the injustice in the system, and in his own heart as well.

Apollina, his counterpart, is a much harsher character. As a Dream Interpreter, she is even closer to Eli and his inner circle, an intimate part of how his repressive regime actually works. Even more than Scylla, Apollina’s intimate use of dreams on Metis is central to Eli’s plans, and is insidious and shows the evil that is at the heart of Eli’s world. Eli may have created the Four Cities as a refuge for humanity and guided them over the last 200 years, but he has turned it into a prison, and Apollina is the character who shows that.

The second tentpole is the CDL and the Matres. Focused as I was (thanks to Dahlan’s writing), I did not consider or stop to think in Reset an essential question: Where do children come from in this society? In Freeset, Dahlan decides to answer that by having a separate, nearly autonomous microcity far away from the four, called the CDL. The CDL is a crèche where children are raised under the watchful eyes of a set of clone sisters, the Matres. We get to meet several of the Matres, and some of the students as well, as the repression and plans of Eli reach and change their world, as do unexpected visitors.

And while I found the story of the students of the CDL and the capriciousness of their lives and their attempts to escape their fate compelling, it felt a little like well-trodden ground. I did like Cass and Bastian as a younger pair to the other couples in the story. Theirs is not quite the romance of the older couples, but the impending potential tragedy of them being separated and wanting to fight it is definitely on sharp thematic point with the rest of Dahlan’s oeuvre. There are strong emotional beats here that Dahlan plays quite wonderfully.

The real problem, though, is that the more Dahlan kept adding these elements to her world, the more rickety and less plausible it seemed to become. In order for Matres to be effective, for example, they are not subject to Tabula Rasa, so that they can raise children from birth to the time they are sent into the Four Cities or college (and then the Four Cities) after having their memories wiped. Other aspects of the repressive state are put in stark relief and shown, but the cracks in the worldbuilding began to show for me. This is a world where a lot of species have died (mushrooms are a big part of the diet) and yet there are some oddities that exist, like tea and coffee. Where are they being grown, exactly? And if the wipeout of higher species is that complete, I have questions about the stability of the ecosystem, no matter how controlled by the Planner, Eli. This goes to the showing too much of a dystopia problem that I mentioned before. Food webs and ecosystems are extremely complicated and interdependent and the lack of one is devastating. As much as I have a hard time engaging with the premise, this goes right to Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, which shows this problem in stark relief on his generation ship.

And tonally, I think a focus on the repression and the dark tones of the Four Cities vastly changes the look and feel of the first book (and to an extent the prequel) in a way I feel conflicted about. Reset is a very poetic book that focuses on a relationship in a dystopia, an attempt at how love can try and transcend the strongest of boundaries (even if it is not Amor Vincit Omnia). The use of the John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in that first book, for example, gives it a poetic feel that is somewhat lacking here. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the first book, although it does try. It tries to reach for that same Amor Vincit Omnia, but doesn't get there.

The presentation of Freeset is a much more practical and less poetic feel to the dystopia that the Four Cities represented, and while that dystopia was always there, in this book, set in sharp relief, it loses some of the magic and uniqueness that made Reset so powerful for me. A totalitarian police force using drugs, dream control, drones, and other equipment? Training of children from birth? Ever tightening security and surveillance? A ruler becoming increasingly obsessed and paranoid? You probably have read this before. The problem is, within the bounds of Freeset itself, there isn’t enough distinction here to really engage me as a reader. The CDL is interesting, certainly, and its location, once revealed, is a landscape I do need to visit with my camera. But the narrower focus on the CDL and on the police takes away the uniqueness of the Four Cities as a location and an idea, and I think that ultimately weakens the book.

However, I will say that, even if the worldbuilding showed problems by overexplaining, and I had issues with the tone, the writing of the book retains the high line-by-line quality of Reset and Preset. Dahlan is an engaging, immersive author whose prose brings the characters’ emotional states firmly into the reader’s mind. I have not listened to the audio versions of this or the other books in the series, but given the publisher (Blackstone) and the emotional quality of Dahlan’s writing, I think this is the kind of book that maybe isn’t suited for a long car trip, but definitely one to listen to once you’ve reached your hotel room and want to get immersed.

In the end, while Reset was extraordinary, and Preset well written, Freeset turns out to be something of a disappointment for me. It is very possible that if you do like dystopias, this is going to be something you enjoy, particularly since this is not entirely the usual “young people in a YA-adjacent dystopia” novel in the model of The Hunger Games. Eli and Eleanor, Aris and Metis, and the other characters outside of the CDL are definitely not in that mold (even if one might argue that the concept of Tabula Rasa might be a way to stunt emotional growth). I don’t think there is quite enough here for me to unabashedly recommend it.

I will, however, be curious, now that the Four Cities are behind Dahlan, what new vistas and ideas she will seek to write about.

Highlights:

• Interesting ideas for a dystopia that is not the usual YA

• Strong emotional beats and themes

• Poetic and emotionally moving writing

Reference: Dahlan, Sarina. Freeset [Blackstone, 2024].

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.

Review: Preset by Sarina Dahlan

An attempt to top its ambitious predecessor Reset by not providing a sequel, but rather a prequel showing how the world of the four cities came to be.

Second acts are hard. The “Sophomore Slump” is real. And yet there is a real pressure in the book industry to follow up with a sequel, with a series, with a shared universe. A very less trod path, though, is to try and do a prequel to the wildly ambitious book you have just had published, showing the underpinnings of how the strange post-apocalyptic, haunting utopian(?) society of your first book got that way in the first place.

This is Sarina Dahlan’s Preset.

Dahlan’s Reset was an ambitious, and to my view, extremely effective novel that posed central and important questions about identity, memory, personality and what it takes to build and nurture a new kind of society after an apocalypse. And what happens when a personal relationship, or dare I say, a love, proves stronger and more long lasting than any technology or artifice to reset memories and thoughts. It was moving, elegiac, and powerful.

Preset shows us the foundation of that society, in a pair of time frames with the same set of characters. In the earliest time frame, we met the founder of the Four Cities, Eli, and his wife Eleanor. The world is falling apart, but both Eli and Eleanor are driven to find a place of their own, a place of their own. But there are cracks in the foundation of this power couple relationship. And one of those is the other person who has a lien on Eleanor’s heart, John

By contrast, in the second time frame of the novel, things have changed. The bombs have fallen, and the fate of the rest of the world is increasingly uncertain. But the strains of trying to hold a society together in the wake of the apocalypse has driven a permanent fracture between Eli and Eleanor, and Eleanor flees the autocracy of Eli over the cities to the Resistance...and, well, John. But becoming part of the Resistance, a Resistance that justifiably does not trust the wife of Eli. And of course, the Resistance has a Plan. As does Eleanor. And so does Eli.

And so this is a story of the early days of the Four Cities. The hallmarks of the utopian world of Reset are not here. In the first timeline, there is hope and promise that this can be a new life, a new start, a new future. It is very much showing how the ambition and relentless vision of Eli, and the strivings of Eleanor, shape what will come. It is a world, though, with the Sword hanging overhead, of the footsteps of an approaching doom, or wyrd, all the same. The second timeline is the early days of the Four Cities on their own. Eli has attempted to maintain control, to work toward his perfect society. But there are those who would topple the order he had made, who would resist what they see as his tyranny.

But there is much more going on than just these plot lines. Relationships, romantic and otherwise are a hallmark of Dahlan’s first novel, and overcoming the 4 year cycle of imposed forgetting is a major thread of that novel, in finding where the heart will take someone who only slowly learns to open her heart. This novel, by comparison, takes a different set of romantic relationship issues--the issues of staying with someone who is more addicted to their vision and their ideas than you and what you want, and then the costs of leaving such a relationship, only to find that the person whom your heart is settling on, now, has, in fact, moved on.

In many ways, this is a much more painful book. That is not to say that the first novel. Reset, lacks that poignancy, especially as Aris, and the reader, get a true sense of what is lost and the costs of the “four year memory wipe” that is at the center. That is seen as the rhythms of that world overthrown as the characters struggle to break a cycle that they are seemingly trapped in by the designs of their world.

Preset is not concerned with cycles, this is two time frames at the beginning of the story of the Four Cities. Preset is concerned with genesis and creation. (In point of fact, there is a “Project Genesis” within the novel, showing that the author was definitely putting a spotlight on this). There are concerns, in the second timeline, about the genesis, the creation of a world for the remnants of humanity to try and survive in. This is a prequel that is in many ways a much more traditional SF novel than Reset. Reset is like reading a recurring, waking dream, as the characters struggle to escape its cycle. Preset is concerned with the building of a new society, a new path, a new way forward, and how it is just the sacrifice of a relationship, in the end, that makes that society possible.

But this gets to the issue that I really want to dig into here, and that is the idea and issues around prequels themselves.

Prequels: What ARE they good for?

There is a school in writing that suggests that knowing when the story starts is an important factor in writing a story or a novel. Where is the important place for the story to start? Starting a story or a novel in the wrong place wrong-foots the writer, and ultimately the reader. The problem with many prequels is that a prequel, in effect, catapults the reader backward and decides that the story did not begin where the writer originally thought it did. And that foreknowledge of what will happen can weaken the narrative within the prequel itself. Either the prequel or the original book can then wind up being a pale imitation of the other, and thus in the end both books together are weaker than the original novel. This also works in movies as well, if one considers how the elf-dwarf romance (Tauriel-Kili) in the Hobbit movies absolutely cheapens the hard won friendship that Gimli and Legolas have to build, between two cultures that do not trust each other, in the Lord of the Rings movies.

Also there is a problem of overlapping a character with its prequel. It can for me as a reader feel stagnant to read the prequel to the novel I just read, just to have the character I enjoyed in the first novel, to have been pretty much who they are in the prequel, or a convoluted and jury rigged sequences of events is needed to mold a character into the character we see in the original novel. It feels more like a crossword puzzle than a novel, an attempt by the author to “get the character” to who they are in the original book. This frustrates me, too.

A prequel such as Preset, though, does avoid some of this blowback. By avoiding having such a wide gulf between the time frame of the first novel and the second novel, we get to see a very different sort of world. The utopia of the Four Cities, for all of its faults as seen in Reset, is a hard won thing, and in the two time frames are so removed from the first that the overlap of characters is just about not there. The characters of Eli and Eleanor are present in Reset, but in such a changed form (and so relatively briefly) that they really are new characters, tabula rasa for the author, to explore here in these pages.. But in Reset, the poignancy and tragedy of those two characters is established as a fact, and in Preset, we see just how that tragedy came out, in the creation of the Four Cities as its running concept in the original book.

In many ways, then, Preset depends on that last chapter of Reset in which we pull the camera back a bit, but that is somewhat unfair to readers and to the author. Preset creates the world of Reset and while there are hints and strains and the building blocks of the world of Reset are shown, it is in fact a very different story.

I do have a radical proposal for the reader who has not read either of these novels and is considering doing so. Upon reflection and thought (and a review of Reset), I think that these novels should be read in order of their internal chronology and not publication order. The story of Preset, is a tragedy of relationships and pain as the world breaks and the sacrifice of that relationship and how that relationship’s breaking ultimately creates the utopia that we then see in Reset. I am thinking especially here of the chapter in Reset which, in reading these two novels in “reverse order”, ultimately ties the original novel to its prequel second, and makes it a united whole.

But does this ultimately work? I am still uncertain and I have considered and reconsidered this question. For all of the underpinnings of character, romance and relationship that the novels share, depicting a utopia (however so very flawed) and depicting the creation of that utopia are completely different kinds of stories. I admire that sort of ambition in a writer. It shows range and a willingness to take a big risk.

But the question that comes back to me--is this book *necessary*? Is this a story ultimately that needed to be told. Eli and Eleanor and the fruit of the tragedy of their relationship, as seen in Reset - was it necessary to show and map out the contours of a story that is, in Reset, so very sketched out enough for the reader to fill in the gaps. I think the writer definitely wanted to explore this story and make it work. There is something rather mythic about these characters as seen in Reset (to the point of using mythic language in fact). The characters in Preset are all so very human, by comparison. Very flawed. Very prone to making mistakes. And that is part of the point.

Does this mean that this book is a story of apotheosis, in a sense, how these two flawed individuals together, despite themselves, create the world of Reset? A utopia that they themselves cannot really share, a world and future of their collaborative creation that they stand apart from and are by the needs and structures of their roles, can NEVER be a part of? Perhaps.

"Stories never live alone, they are the branches of a family that we have to trace back, and forward".

Roberto Calasso wrote that in the first pages of his fantastic look at Greek mythology, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. I know he might counsel you to read these in publication order, and trace the story backward. I still maintain that you, reader might want to follow my advice, and read them forward.

But in the end the point is that these novels are worth reading, and while Preset in many ways can be more pedestrian and less philosophical and reflective than Reset, it is a story worth having been told, and for you to read.

--

The Math

Highlights:

• The painful building of utopia, at the cost of a relationship
• Strong character beats and arcs spread across two timelines
• But is it a necessary book compared to it’s first?

Dahlan, Sarina, Preset [Blackstone Publishing, 2023]

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I’m just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.